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Projects

In addition to the work we do supporting the research and curatorial activities of the Smithsonian, Libraries staff are often involved in collaborative projects with other institutions, or are working on internal projects which are not hosted on our website. Here are some of the interesting things we've been working on lately:

Digital Public Library of America

The Smithsonian Libraries shares our digitized content with dp.la in two ways. The first is through our membership in the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which provides books, journal articles, and archival material related to biodiversity research. The second channel is through the Smithsonian's Collections Search. Our digitized books, along with selected images and Smithsonian authored articles stored in Smithsonian Research Online are all indexed in both Collections Search and DPLA.

To improve the workflow in our mass-digitization programs, lead developer Joel Richard has created a web-based, open-source tool that enables us to add page-level metadata to scanned books (or other 'sequentially organized' objects) as well as package and submit those scans to the Internet Archive. The code has been released under an Apache v.2 license and is available on GitHub. If you or your organization are interested in using, or becoming committers, to this project, contact Joel Richard.

World Digital Library

The Smithsonian is a signatory member of the World Digital Library (WDL). The WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world. Smithsonian Libraries has provided six objects to the collection. These include high-quality scans and rich descriptive records for titles such as Theatrum instrumentorum et machinarum by Jacques Besson andSystema Saturnium by Christiaan Huygens. Nancy Gwinn is the Smithsonian representative to the group.

Biodiversity Heritage Library

The Smithsonian Libraries is one of the founding members of this virtual library, and is currently home to the administrative hub of the library known as the Secretariat. Since 2006 we have been digitizing material from our natural history collections to share through BHL. Learn more on our Biodiversity Heritage Library page.